Was it really so much of a surprise that after two terms of a Democrat in the White House, the next president is a Republican, that with a significant appetite for change and widespread contempt for the establishment, a political outsider triumphed over an icon of Washington’s élite?

No. The shock, of course, is not that someone representing change won the 2016 election but that this specific candidate did. Many observers can’t understand how a man apparently as unsuitable as Donald Trump – accused of sexual assault and recorded on tape bragging of the very same, running a campaign with racist overtones and policies that threaten human rights and the rule of law and with such a tendency to lie that he seemed to be living in an alternate reality – became president.

The answer is that the candidates matter a lot less than we think they do. Their backgrounds, their experience, their behaviour and their policies are all a lot less relevant to the outcome of an election than many other factors.

We treat the candidates like the star players in the spectator sport of politics. But unlike athletes, their actions aren’t the sole determinant of the outcome, nor even the most significant one. The final score of a football game isn’t the result of a vote by spectators, some of whom are only tuning in occasionally.

We tell ourselves that campaigns matter, that they are a competition between ideas and people and that those with the best proposals, character and temperament will win. The highly paid consultants who micromanage campaigns, and the pundits who parse their every move on television panels, perpetuate this idea because it’s their business. Who would say on television that their work was inconsequential?

But many of the things that matter to political junkies don’t resonate with the public. And for all the websites that ingest poll numbers and run them through sophisticated electoral college models, you could predict the outcome of four-fifths of the elections in North America with three simple questions:

• How long has the incumbent’s party been in power?

• What percentage of the electorate would say the economy is going badly?

• Is there a significant appetite for change?

For example: even a rock-star leader of the Conservative party will have low odds of winning the next election because fatigue with the current government will not yet have peaked. The odds of a Conservative win will improve in the election that follows that one because it’s rare, although not impossible, for a party to win three times in a row. If the Liberals are still in power three elections from now, the chances will be very good that even a mediocre Conservative leader of that time will become prime minister.

Timing is much more important than the calibre of the candidate. Was Michael Ignatieff an awful contender and Justin Trudeau a brilliant one? Was Trump head and shoulders above Mitt Romney or John McCain? No. The main advantage for Trump and Trudeau is that they came along in the right moment. Many Canadians had reservations about Trudeau, just as many Americans considered Donald Trump unfit for office (for different reasons). But other factors drove their decisions.

Although the media coverage would have you believe otherwise, this election wasn’t about Donald Trump or what he said or did. It wasn’t even about what was happening in the campaign, but what was going on in the lives of the voters. So many Americans were fed up and wanted to shake up the establishment that it was almost inevitable that the Republican would win. Trump’s behaviour might have reduced that likelihood for a time but in the end it didn’t matter.

That’s not to say there was nothing at stake in the election. Who becomes president matters a great deal. But if we want to predict the outcome, we should spend less time scrutinizing the people with their names on the ballots and more time looking at those who are marking them.

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